A quote, IM'd from Meade, who's been reading my blog this morning. We share a Kindle account, so he can search for "happiness" in the same books on his iPad that I've got on mine.

He sends 2 more from the same book:

1. "You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art."

2. "Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."

51 comments:

No. Acceptance is NOT the key. The key is doing what you've got to do without conning yourself that you like it while finding something you WANT to do and then doing THAT often enough to stave off madness.

Put down the consumer electronics and step away from the hotspots. This is how symbiosis starts.

"A quote, IM'd from Meade, who's been reading my blog this morning. We share a Kindle account, so he can search for "happiness" in the same books on his iPad that I've got on mine". Electronic togetherness, what a concept.

Some months back I read a Robert Heinlein novel titled Farnham's Freehold. It's kind of a bizarre book in the way that Heinlein does tend to be bizarre, only more so -- hmmm, nuclear war, time travel, cannibalism, and a racial element that is rather, shall we say, edgy for 1964, when it was written.

Anyway, in the future society that occupies part of the plot, there is a drug something like Aldous Huxley's "soma." It is called ... wait for it ... Happiness.

Fahrenheit 451 was my cup o' tea for dystopia. But then I'm a bibliophile. None of these fancy e-books for me. My electronics are for work, my books are for me. I take them everywhere. I caress them, I want to know their innermost thoughts. I love the feel of the paper, the slight clay dust that accumulates on you fingertips so that you have to wet them to turn the page. I take them to the bathroom on weekends for intimate soaks in a steamy tub. To the bed to cuddle with on lonely restless nights.

Huxley's letter to George Orwell, telling him that 1984 was a masterpiece and gently reminding Orwell that Huxley wrote a brilliant dystopian novel

The lessons of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein are ever timely. And although I only saw the movie, and did not read the book, Children of Men, and its idea of the despair and hopelessness of world of barren women is timely too during this push for a contraceptive paradise.

No. Acceptance is NOT the key. The key is doing what you've got to do without conning yourself that you like it while finding something you WANT to do and then doing THAT often enough to stave off madness.

Ah the mantra of greatness, I assume ricpic is a truly great man, inventor, patent holder, admired by millions...

I don't believe many people live their life continuously asking themselves whether they are happy. I don't think people want things like beauty or status because they think it will make them happy for life, most people aren't that stupid. I think unhappines and wanting more than one has is the driving force of humanity. Happy brain rests, unhappy brain works. Optimists rule the world, and no, optimists are not permamnently happy people, they are the ones who, when unhappy, believe they can do something about it.

I believe when you do your very best it becomes a gift.. the way art and love are gifts.

"From his father Jobs had learned that a hallmark of passionate craftsmanship is making sure that even the aspects that will remain hidden are done beautifully."

"One of the most extreme—and telling—implementations of that philosophy came when he scrutinized the printed circuit board that would hold the chips and other components deep inside the Macintosh. No consumer would ever see it, but Jobs began critiquing it on aesthetic grounds. 'That part’s really pretty,' he said. 'But look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.'"

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863)

Re: The Children of Men, I haven't seen the movie, but have read the book. Based on Mark Steyn's review of the movie ... I'd say you're well advised to read the book, and try to forget you ever saw the movie.

It is true that apparently it was the intention of the director to hijack Children of Men and make it primarily a story about mistreatment of immigrants, etc., but unless you are determined to see it that way, he failed. (In those same lines, apparently Starship Troopers was supposed to be an indictment of society as a police state, but there too viewers missed that angle, seeing it in more patriotic terms.)

In Children of Men, the film, the hopelessness of a world without babies overwhelms any other politics.

I would highly recommend seeing the movie. Just ignore the side-story.

Theo (played by Clive Owen): I can't really remember when I last had any hope, and I certainly can't remember when anyone else did either. Because really, since women stopped being able to have babies, what's left to hope for?

Miriam (Pam Ferris*): As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd, what happens in a world without children's voices.

The truth is -- it is a baby who is the savior of the world.____________

* When I saw Children of Men a few years ago, I never realized that this is the same woman who played the ghastly Miss Trunchbull in Matilda.

Happiness is a transitory state which, if you have nothing to compare it to, will be unrecognized for what it is. It's for this reason that - while I can't say I like my low points - I don't overlook them and give them their due:

Great video, Pogo. Thanks for linking to that. And for sharing a bit of yourself in the process.

That long term experience, the deeper contentment, is in Christian theology distinguished as joy rather than happiness.

Happiness is a fleeting reaction to circumstances. Joy is what we bring to those circumstances in expectation and insistence that circumstances will not be definitive for our identity. C.S. Lewis, for one, was surprised by this.